Widely considered the most influential and innovative poet of America, Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, a village near Hempstead, Long Island, on 31 May 1819 to Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. His father had been born just after the end of the American Revolution and had known and admired Thomas Paine. Walt Whitman was, thus, part of the first generation of Americans who were born in the newly formed United States. Pride in the emergent nation was rampant, and Walter Sr.--after giving his first son, Jesse (born in 1818), his own father's name, his second son his own name, his daughter Mary (born in 1822) the name of his wife's grandmothers, and his daughter Hannah (born in 1823) the name of his own mother--turned to the heroes of the Revolution and the War of 1812 for the names of three of his other sons: Andrew Jackson (born in 1827), George Washington...